Hello and welcome to the Defender podcast powered by Clean Wisconsin. I'm Amy Barrilleaux. This episode actually aired for the first time last spring, and it continues to be one of our most downloaded episodes because let's face it, people want to know if letting all the dandelions and violets and basically every kind of weed take root and grow in your yard during the month of May is worth it. Does No Mow May really make a difference in the battle to save our pollinators?
Well, it turns out I have a yard and I definitely want to help our native pollinators. So I invited an expert over for a tour to find out what I'm doing wrong, what I am doing right, and how often I really need to mow. That's right now on The Defender. It's that time of year when we have a decision to make, to mow or not to mow. Since it started in the UK, No Mow May has definitely reached Wisconsin, and that means dandelions and violets left untouched in yards across the state.
On a warm early spring day, I meet Elizabeth Braatz, who heads up the Bumblebee Brigade Pollinator Program for the Department of Natural Resources, to tour a typical Wisconsin yard, my yard, and learn all about No-Mo-May. First, I guess, explain for people who haven't heard of No Mow May what the general concept is around that?
So the concept of No-Mow May started with people thinking that, well, what if we don't mow for a month so that little flowers in the midst of the yard have a chance to grow up a little further. And while there's a lot of research that still needs to be done on specifically not mowing at all for the month of May, there has been research done on bee-friendly lawns, which is the idea that.
If you have spring ephemerals or small little flowers that are poking up throughout your lawn, it can be really helpful for native bees and other pollinators. And similarly, maybe a kind of less mow may or slow mow summer might be the way to pivot because it can be very neat in theory and then kind of hard in practice to not mow for a month and then have a very large lawn with annoyed neighbors and it actually can be very hard in the grass.
So another way to look at it is just to kind of slow-mow summer where you let it grow higher than you normally might would, maybe at the highest setting that your lawnmower can do and then try to mow about one-third of the amount, rather than going from maybe like 12 inches to 3 inches or something after the end of the month and everyone's sick of it, like, alright, let's just cut it all short and show it again. But there's a lot of other ways as well, so... Just standing in your yard.
I'm seeing all sorts of examples of ways that yards can can provide really really crucial habitat. Well let's take a look. So I don't have very many flowering weeds yet, but we'll walk in the back because I have a couple. You know, it takes a while for my yard to start growing anything. So, I guess, no mow may, people are thinking, well, these little spring flowers are popping out and that's where, you know, that's what the pollinators need. Is that basically true?
Yes. Spring blooming flowers are really, really vital for pollinators. For example, so we're going to think about the life cycle of the bumblebee. So we live year after year and we eat throughout the winter and everything, but bumblebees don't quite do that. They have an annual cycle. So that means that, while we're...
Cozy in our homes, they're cozy under leaf litter and so on, which is a great reason why leaving a bit of leaves in your yard can be really, really valuable for these overwintering insects. Most of the colony is dead during winter. Only the new queens or gynes are alive, and they are overwintering. But after they wake up in the spring, they are very hungry. And so they need two things. They need to search for a place to nest for the
future colony. And they need to feed themselves, because they have had a very, very long diet over the winter. And also, they need enough food to provision their new colony. So that's why spring blooming plants and early blooming flowers are actually really key, because while we may not as many bees, the ones that we do see are really important, because... They are often the queens, so if you, yeah.
So if we see bees this time of year, that's queens that have just now kind of come out of their underground or underleaf overwintering stay. Yeah, it's very, very likely that most of the bees you see in early spring are going to be queens or gynes. I mean, maybe if one gets out really, really early, then maybe she's already made a generation, but
that would be unlikely. Most of the time it's gyns or new queens, and you can tell them, besides the timing of it, they tend to be a little larger than workers of the same species. They tend to very well-groomed. I have a lack of a better word. Very, very tidy bees with very nice hair. And especially if you see them scanning, kind of zigzagging along the ground, it's like they're searching for something and they are, they're probably searching for a nest site.
Well, so over here in the back, I have these little blue flowers, also looking very weedy. So we certainly haven't mowed yet. So these are maybe something that pollinators might want to dig into? Yeah, quite probably, possibly.
And it's interesting the kind of the weedy concept is something that it'd be great to have discussions on and maybe kind of start shifting that mindset of so why do we think that this perfect English lawn from across the sea is what everything needs to look like, and it's okay to have a bit of native plants and natural... Uh, spring blooming flowers and things like that.
Uh, and if you, I know that some people are in HOAs and similar things where they have to be careful, so I'm not saying to, to, flaunt all the rules, but uh, sometimes also you can have a kind of gradient of neatness. Maybe you, the front yard is more neat and then you have, you can, you could do a bit of your own thing a little more in the backyard, but I think it's very, very possible to have a very, very beautiful... Yard and provide a ton of habitat for native bees.
So if we look here, we're in my not very well-kept backyard with plenty of random stuff around. It's a beautiful backyard. It's lovely. We're looking back. So this is a dead part of a tree that we had trimmed last, or we trimmed, and we didn't know what to do with the trimmings. And so they're just kind of piled up by the fence. We got some sort of random sticks, some weedy flowering plants, a lot of sticks and leaves.
But I think people might come back here and be like, you need to clean all this stuff up. Should we clean it all up? Or from your pollinator perspective, what is this? What are you seeing here? I'm seeing so much habitat. A lot of habitat here. And so we'll go through some of the things. So there's some dead branches with leaves on them in the back, in the corner. That is great habitat for all sorts of insects to hide underneath and use for habitat because it provides shelter.
And we think of the kind of basics of what do we need? We need food, water and shelter. Most animals are exactly the same, so. When I see that, I see those branches and leaves and so on, I'm seeing an insect paradise to hide underneath and survive the winter, as well as even during, later in the summer, to provide habitat for them. Similarly, I'm see a pile of kind of stems. I'm gonna actually wander over here. Alright, oh my gosh, look! Here, here! You can hear that! It's pithy stems!
So we have a ton of them. So there are about 400 to 500 species of native bees in Wisconsin. Incredible diversity! All these amazing creatures just kind of flying under under our noses. And a lot of them, so 85% of them are actually solitary. So by solitary, I mean if you think of the kind of classic bee on the cereal box, the honeybee, these huge colonies of bees. Most bees actually aren't like that.
Most of them are kind of a single family businesses, mom and pop shops, where the male and female will mate, and then they'll provide nests and provisioning for their kids. And that's the extent of the colony, so it's just one family. And so a lot of these bees will nest in Oh my gosh, ducks! Yeah.
Delightful. Blind. Nature. All sorts of, yeah, if anyone tuning in also likes birds, a lot of the things that are good for pollinators are also good for birds, like some of the flowering shrubs and so on can be great habitat, but alright, stems. So what what they'll do is they will go into the kind of hollow pithy stem. And they'll lay an egg and then they'll put in a little bit of pollen ball and provisioning for the little baby bee inside that stem.
And then they will kind of section it off and then lay another one with another pollen ball. And they'll keep going until there's a whole hotel of little bees hiding inside the stem waiting to the dead stem waiting, to emerge in the spring. And so keeping these around is really helpful because we don't know this could be quite a quite a number of little pollinators hiding inside using it as a home.
So these are stems I think I broke off of some perennial plants in the late fall and just kind of threw them in the backyard. And so you're saying that little bees, could be eggs, could be inside of these stems. Yeah, yeah, they'd probably be, I guess they're dependent on the species at what stage they're in at what time, but yes, they'll use woody stems and pithy stems to overwinter and store their future generations in.
Speaking also of kind of neatness, there are different ways that you can still have a lot of these aspects of a pollinator-friendly habitat and still have it look very neat and orderly. For example, the University of Wisconsin Arboretum is a wonderful habitat. And it also, well, they also have people who are working very diligently as their full-time jobs to keep it tidy, but it is also very tidy. For example for the stems, you can, I've seen people kind of pile them and
put them in the back. Similarly for leaf mulch, you could almost use fallen leaves as mulch if you, so leaving the leaves is another really helpful thing. So that these critters can have somewhere underneath to hibernate, which I see leaves floating. You sure do. And all sorts of things floating around here, which is great.
But people can, if it's in other parts of the yard, sometimes maybe you wanna rake it off of parts of your yard, but you can use it as a free natural mulch around your native plant gardens and so on. Similarly, some of the brush piles I've seen people make. They'll cut them in about the same size and then stack them in a corner so that it looks a little more like it was deliberately put there and tidy and so on.
Rock piles are another thing that oh which I see some over there We have giant rock piles everywhere. I think, you know, as we put in gardens, we find rocks and then we just stick them somewhere until we might need a rock someday, so yeah, big pile of rocks right here.
Oh yeah, so a lot of bees actually are also ground nesting bees and so they'll so little patches of bare ground or rock piles or things like that they'll hide underneath and use as habitat and so you can you can make the rock pile as as natural as natural or as orderly as you want it's still a rock pile that they can use so yeah another So this time of year, I'll take you back to my, right now, pretty sad perennial bed in
the back. This time of the year I think I see a lot of people coming in clearing these beds out. So there are leaves that have fallen here from last fall that right now are still there. So would you advise trying to leave these leaves, because you mentioned leave the leaves, or when is the best time to clear these things out.
Well, if you if you can if you could stand it I would I would say to let it let it stay here and Provide you're taking away all this natural free mulch with all the nutrients and all the protection of the soil and all the little critter invertebrates hiding underneath that might help the health of your soil underneath and that all these leaves are a part of protecting it also with the evaporation and evaporation and moisture retention. Leaves are really, really great.
So if possible, I would encourage people to consider leaving the leaves as long as they can. And once the flowers and plants grow up, it's going to be a lot harder to see it anyway. So of just rethinking what what what is a successful gardern. So when you see people you know coming out on a nice spring day and raking out all these leaves and then like replacing the leaves with mulch that they bought at the store, kind of what goes through your mind? A hundred tiny bees are screaming!
Yeah, I totally get it. We want to have things tidy, and it's become such a cultural norm as well to have, oh, well, at this time I clean everything out and I put it in the wood mulch and then I buy more, and then it's all dyed and treated and so on, and I'll stick this on top. And yeah, I completely understand. If possible, using leaves as mulch instead.
Or at least you're kind of reducing the mulching use is really helpful because I mentioned earlier those ground nesting bees with a really thick mulch layer they can't get to the ground so it gets really hard for them to nest so you're disrupting that part of their cycle and yeah you can you can save a little a little money and effort to to let the existing cycle that's kind of come come about over thousands and thousands of years to... Do its course, and I'd recommend that if possible.
Another really neat thing I've seen with mulch in a native garden is that you can kind of do a reverse mulch. So instead of mulching everything and leaving a path of grass that you have to keep mulching, you can mulch a path and then have gardens surrounding
it. And then you walk on the mulched path and see your garden and have maybe a section that you leave as long to have picnics, and so on So back to the lawn, I know you were talking about earlier about no mow may and maybe it's it's maybe more of a less mow-May concept could be successful too. I definitely think so.
I think there was, let's see, University of Minnesota has been doing a lot of really great research concerning lawns, and they've been finding some good flower-visiting insect responses from bee-friendly lawns. So ones that, such as your yard, that have all these little flowers interspersed in them, as well as, again, maybe letting it grow a little I'm tired. Can help with those plants growing up, but it doesn't have to be after a full month.
And we also, we wanna make sure it's sustainable from a human standpoint, because I've heard that sometimes it can be hard on maintenance and the people who are mowing, or if you're doing in a city, can become a bit hard to maintain from a operation standpoint. And so we really want to make sure these systems still work with.
With what we're doing as people so that we can keep doing them, kind of like doing a diet where you only eat broccoli for a month is probably not going to be sustainable, so I'd much rather recommend something that people can do a little bit at a time and not have some of the downsides of not mowing for too long that can...
So I guess you're saying, you know, if we keep some habitat on the ground, some sticks, some leaves, some rocks, that when the queens kind of come out of their nests and they're hungry, if haven't mowed at this point in the year, or maybe as these natural flowers start kind of cropping up in April and May, then we've left some food. And that's basically, that's what we really want to accomplish this time of year.
Yes. Exactly, we're really looking to provide that, those food for the hungry queens or gynes, I guess, if they're bumblebees. And one thing I'd also mention is to, I wouldn't get too too worried about the exact mowing cycles, since also if a lawn is completely covered in pesticides and insecticides and only turf grass, Regardless of whether or not you mow it for a month, it probably will not be providing very much habitat for things that are looking to eat from there.
And so that more kind of, that holistic approach of what is the whole garden doing and how is it providing habitat for these different life stages is I think a great lens to look at it. So maybe, you know, if we look over here, I can see some more, I don't, I think these are might be different purple flowers and then some dandelions and some other things.
Once those are kind of done blooming and our grass is getting high, maybe it's mid May, we shouldn't feel too bad about going ahead and mowing the parts of our yard that are for mowing, but we should think about all the other parts of the yard. Exactly, yeah. When it's time to mow, sometimes you gotta mow and I completely understand that.
But yes, like you said, thinking about those other parts of the yard, thinking about the piles of leaves and the native plant garden that you put in and the rock piles and all those other things. And I see that we're actually standing right behind a vegetable garden. So you're getting some food. I see, ooh, tomato.
Trellises, wonderful bumble bees actually are really really great pollinators of tomatoes because they'll do buzz pollination where they basically they grab onto the flower and then they vibrate and then it shakes pollen onto them and they're very efficient at uh a lot of these plants so okay uh yeah so you're you're eating the the bees are helping with the the things you're eating as well and uh yeah i see all these twigs and and leaves and stuff in this vegetable bed and it's great to see.
So really the things that you might feel bad about if you live in a suburban area, I haven't had time to clean out my leaves, I haven't had time pick up all the sticks or to move my brush to the curb for brush pick up are actually things to kinda be proud of. Yeah, take all that energy that you're spending feeling ashamed and trying to
work on this. And if you take a portion of that energy and turn it into providing more spring blooming, summer blooming, fall blooming, flowering plants for pollinators, I think you'd still end up with a really, really beautiful garden. You're helping encourage cycles that will help it kind of sustain itself. Yeah, so I guess the main takeaway is I'd say for things that you can do. And no worries, you don't have to do all of them.
Like start small with something that feels like you can do it this summer. OK. And if you add one of these list items every summer for the next couple of years, suddenly you'll look out and you'll have this, this. Whole habitat. So the four kind of main items I'd say would be habitat, especially overwintering habitat, so that includes leaving the leaves, reducing mulching or maybe reversing mulching into paths and saving stems. Food, so we're providing habitat slash shelter.
Now we're looking at food, and so that's going to be planting native blooming flowers, and your vegetable gardens as well are great for all seasons. And maybe that includes, depending on whether your lawn does have those little flowers throughout it, doing some kind of slow mow version of mowing. Another one is also just kind of reducing pesticides and insecticides, since you can have all these sorts of things, but if you keep...
Filling it with insecticides, well, that may kill some insects you don't like, it will also kill a lot of insects that are doing all sorts of work for your garden that you may not even be realizing that they're doing, such as eating pests naturally or pollinating. And then finally, sharing knowledge. So chatting about this new version of your garden with neighbors, chatting about with your family, sometimes if you see it.
A neat bumblebee in your yard, you can send it in to the bumble bee brigade with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. And so, yeah, try something and spread it on. Well, you know, you have made me feel so good about my yard. I'll just leave it like this for as long as possible. It's real easy to not come out and do yard work on a pretty day. I can go for a bike ride or do something else.
So Elizabeth Braatz from the Bumble Bee Brigade with the DNR, thank you so much for coming to my yard and for sharing your wisdom about how to protect our pollinators. Well, my pleasure, thanks for having me! And thank you for listening to the Defender Wisconsin's environmental podcast. If you have something you want me to talk about, or just a question or a comment, send me an email podcast at cleanwisconsin.org until next time. I'm Amy Barrilleaux.